Mastodawn

In other news, we voted in person for the first time since the pandemic started yesterday. I dropped the ball on getting our absentee ballots for town meeting, so down we went. It was good to see the ladies running the voting tables. They're so nice. And no word was said about our masks.

The 2 non-fascists running for the select board also won, so yay!
#Vermont #TownMeeting

Gemma Seymour Feb 26

#Brattleboro #Vermont #TownMeeting

Tuesday March 3

Vote NO on Article II
Vote NO on Article III
Vote YES on Article IV

#VT #VTpol #VTpoli

Jessamyn Feb 17

Adapt xckcd 2501 to your area of abstruse specialization.

https://marshdeer.github.io/xkcd2501-generator/

via @overholt

#vermont #TownMeeting

Show thread

Gemma Seymour Feb 5

#Brattleboro ranks 6th, right in the middle of the 11 towns and cities with greater than 10000 residents. However, Brattleboro is the only municipality in Vermont which utilizes a representative form of #TownMeeting. Of the other 10, only 4 municipalities have any type of floor vote by an open Town Meeting, and none of them vote on any issues of great consequence by a floor vote. Of those 4, only Williston even bothered to report the number of voters present at the floor vote.

Gemma Seymour Feb 5

Here is a spreadsheet of the Top 11 municipalities in #Vermont by population (2020 Decennial Census Data), showing the number of registered voters in 2025, how many voted, what type of #elections and #TownMeeting they hold, what type of government they have, and their votes on the FY26 budget (#VT SecState reported data) Of them, the City of #Burlington and the Town of #Brattleboro are the only two that do not hold a townwide ballot to approve the municipal budget.

#VTpol #VTpoli

Gemma Seymour Feb 5

All societies above a certain size and scope are better governed by representation. The voters of #Brattleboro understood this in the 1960s, when they made the change to Representative Town Meeting. Are we more wise than they?

by Gemma Seymour, Tuesday, February 3, 2026 — Issue 851

https://www.commonsnews.org/issue/851/851rtm_seymour

#Vermont #VT #VTpol #VTpoli #VTelections #TownMeeting #TownMeetingDay

‘Lamb will be on the menu’

All societies above a certain size and scope are better governed by representation. The voters of Brattleboro understood this in the 1960s, when they made the change to Representative Town Meeting. Are we more wise than they?

The Commons

Judy Anderson May 9, 2025

New England has direct democracy for town government in many towns. Which means that anybody can go to town meeting where we decide on the budget and zoning laws and pretty much anything in the town. There are committees that figure out the important bits, and there's a board of selectmen and various other elected boards, but it's the people who actually get to decide.

It's a bit of a zoo. Because anybody can get up and object to something and make an amendment -- and they do! And then they object to the meeting moderator's call of the voice vote and make us all have a standing vote. But, it is still kind of cool, despite everything taking way longer than it ought to. We were there for five hours on Monday night and four hours on Tuesday night.

Of course, in some ways it's really "non-representative democracy", because a lot of people don't go, because it's not convenient for them to be awake until midnight (it wasn't really convenient for me, but I stayed anyway), or they just don't care enough to spend their evening sitting around the high school auditorium listening to people drone on about this or that planning board initiative.

#TownMeeting #NewEngland #localPolitics